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St. Jude Memorial and Virtual Wakepermalink #1
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Official Bio of St. Jude(jonl)Fri 1 Aug 03 09:22

Judith Milhon AKA St. Jude 1939 - 2003
Hacker legend, author, editor, poet and reader Judith Milhon (AKA St.
Jude) died on July 19, 2003. After outrunning cancer through several
rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, recurring metastases led her to
decline additional treatment with her characteristic black humor.
Considered by many to be the first woman hacker of the personal computing
era, Jude was an early programmer, co-founder of Community Memory, senior
editor of Mondo 2000, writer of several essential books on the cyberpunk
movement and a co-founder of the Cypherpunks encryption cabal. As St Jude,
she is a central figure in Steven Levys seminal book Hackers: Heroes of
the Computer Revolution, about the enthusiasts who made personal computing
a reality.
Raised in Washington, D.C. and Indiana, Milhon became part of the
Cleveland, Ohio, beat/hipster scene in the early 1960s. In 1965, she
became active in the Civil Rights Movement, helping to organize the Selma
march, and was jailed for civil disobedience in Jackson, Mississippi.
With Robert Behling (by whom she had a daughter, Tresca) and later, Stan
Heilbrun, Jude established a household in Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of
Antioch College and a key stop on the hipster underground railway. During
this period, she promulgated the term "hippie" by applying it to the local
undergraduates, and taught herself computer programming. Her first
official programming job was at the central kitchen for Horn & Hardart in
New York City.
After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area with lover and long-time best
friend Efrem Lipkin, and her daughter Tresca Behling, Jude worked at
Berkeley Computer Company, microcoding the communications controller of
the BCC super timesharing machine. She also worked as a medic and trainer
during the early days of the Berkeley Free Clinic.
During the late 1960s, she became involved with various of the Berkeley
New Left "revolutionary" groups that proliferated during that era, but
found her true métier among the computer enthusiasts who came to be called
"hackers." In 1973, she joined Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, Ken Colstad, and
Lee Felsenstein in launching Community Memory, the first public online
computer network, which grew out of Lipkin's, Szpakowski's and Colstad's
experiences with Buckminester Fuller's "World Game" and the Berkeley
"University Without Walls"."University Without Walls" projects.
In the mid-1980s, Jude became involved with a Berkeley-based zine called
High Frontiers. In 1989, High Frontiers shifted focus to computer
counterculture, becoming Mondo 2000, the first magazine of the digital
culture. From 1989 - 1994, as St Jude, she was Senior Editor of Mondo,
contributing greatly to its rise to prominence and writing a humorous
column called "Irresponsible Journalism." The magazine achieved a large
cult following and extensive media attention during the early 90s and
continued to publish irregularly until 1998.
As St Jude, she also wrote two books published in 1994, The Cyberpunk
Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fake Book, and (with former Mondo 2000
Editor-in-Chief R.U. Sirius) How to Mutate and Take Over the World: an
Exploded Post-Novel. Her online book proposal, Hacking the Wetware: The
NerdGirl's Pillow Book, first appeared on the Web in 1994 as well. St Jude
also wrote for Wired Magazine and The Net during the 1990s.
In the early 90s, Milhon co-founded and named the "Cypherpunks," a
quasi-anarchist group dedicated to online privacy through encryption.
St. Jude became an Internet legend at the turn of the 21st Century for
giving friendly and enthusiastic advice to young "newbie" hackers who
would contact her, and for encouraging e-women, hackers or not, to develop
their personal power online.
In 2001, after a delayed diagnosis of late-stage cancer, Milhon approached
the disease with her usual intense scientific curiosity and voracious
reading, educating herself about treatments, and engaging in learned
exchanges with her doctors. In early 2003, expected to survive only a few
months, she sent a humorous email to her friends: "Im living too long.
Its embarrassing."
As a sometimes polygamist who frequently lived in communal circumstances,
Milhons personal life was a complex tapestry of long-term relationships.
Nevertheless, she is survived by Efrem Lipkin, her mate, comrade, and
brother of 40 years, her ex-husband Robert Behling, her daughter Tresca
Behling, a grandson Emilio Zuniga, and many lovers of whom Mark
Szpakowski, Stan Heilbrun and Gracie & Zarkov are probably the most
notable.
Jude Milhon, AKA St. Jude 1939-2003
Further St. Jude Info:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59711,00.htmlhttp://boingboing.net/2003_07_01_archive.htmlhttp://magdalen.com/blog/

Jude Milhon was a member of the WELL during the 1990s, active especially
in the conference for Mondo 2000, where she was an editor along with R.U.
Sirius. Everybody loved Mondo, the magazine that fed memes to the
cyborganic revolution and made us all feel completely at home in its
alternate universe of reality hackers and complexity surfers. As her bio
shows, her time with Mondo and her tenure on the WELL were pieces of a
larger, very rich life. Her influence is everywhere in cyberspace.
We're dedicating this space within inkwell.vue for those who knew Jude to
post their thoughts and memories. If you're not a member of the WELL, you
can email your post to inkwell-hosts@well.com, and we'll drop it in.

i'd love to hear what y'all actually think. or are trying not to think. or
feel.
some people here were super-close with jude, tight friends, lovers, and
co-revolutionaries. i didn't know her so well, but i loved every
fucking interaction i had with
her. one powerful day, i met for the first time one Paco Xander Nathan, and
Eric Hughes, and St Jude. i was all, like, in awe of Jude and everything,
fully a fangirl. i had no idea that she'd scoop me right up like i belonged
there. and i did feel like that.
Jude was inspirational, but in a beautifully off-the-cuff sort of way.
think smart, think interestingly. so you're a girl? who cares, try this
computer thing. maybe you won't like it, maybe you will. who cares? come to
cypherpunks brunch. doesn't matter that you couldn't find an algorithm if
it crawled in yr ear. you're funny, girl, keep writing. don't let the
bastards get you down.
i guess... she understood the *spirit* of things and sseemed pretty damned
particular about which spirits were on the right track. but she was
encouraging about all the different ways to *manifest* that spirit. it
didn't just have to be "be an artist" or "be a hacker." it felt like this
all-encompassing madness and brilliance. i felt like it rubbed off on me
when i was around her or when she emailed me. okay so i'd never be as smart
& wonderful; it seemed only obvious that if i continued to be inspired by
women like Jude, i would come to at least *some* level of smartness and
wonderfulness. my life would be odd and not necessarily easy, but
interesting and true and full of delicious characters with complicated
minds.
i feel just i don't know very thankful, i suppose, thankful for that
inspiration. weirdly annoyed that too many people don't know, that they
didn't get to be inspired by the living jude.

Email from Josh Ellis:
Jude is one of the people most responsible for my becoming a full-time
writer. My column for the Las Vegas CityLife this week is a requiem for
her, and a thanks:
http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2003/07/30/scorched_earth/all_tomorro
ws_parties/atp.txt
I hadn't seen Jude since 1997 in the flesh, but I spoke to her on the
phone every few months, and I will miss her terribly. I'm moving back to
San Francisco on Monday; she was one of the first people I wanted to see.
Josh Ellis

And Now: Text from the message Jude left on my answering machine 4
days before dying:
"Ive got to tell you that Im about to leave the planet I think
its pretty likely that Im not going to last another day, so ACK!!!
just as Beethoven went out crying "More Light!" supposedly, thus
pleasing both the metaphorical people and the practical people; I give
you my choices No. Take your choice, babe. When I go out, what am I
screaming for? More this, less that? More hair gel, less ice? ACK!!!"
I havent felt like writing anything whatsoever after finishing 26
months working full time on a book about a month ago; so however
inelegantly, Im going to ramble a bit about my memories of Jude.
Sometime in the mid-80s Jude started coming around the High Frontiers
(later to become Mondo 2000) scene. I'm not sure when she first made a
real impression, but I soon realized that this was a mind that was
easy to speak to about absolutely anything. Here was this incrediby
smart, seemingly calm and sweetly reasonable person. I also soon
realized that she was an excitable girl (grrl?) who could make a huge
celebration out of things like Jim Morgan, freshly arrived from Athens,
Georgia, getting a hipper haircut and taking his name Jas. Jude made a
huge deal about things, when Alison and I were too focused on just one
thing, making a huge deal out of trying to make a magazine work..
Despite her seeming rationality, she insisted that she was weird,
anti-social... After awhile, this became clear. Shed disappear for
long periods. It was like she didnt want to give people -- who were
"angels" or "geniuses" or involved in the hippest thing ever -- a
chance to disappoint her.
But for a self-proclaimed agoraphobic, Jude sure got intimate, to
varying degrees, with a lot of people.
She kept her literary skills hidden all through the High Frontiers
years. I think it was Morgan Russell who brought it out of her, just
as Reality Hackers (long story, never mind) was becoming Mondo 2k.
They had similarities, fussing over pieces for too long a time; lots of
literary references; Morgan was more pretentious (but in an enjoyable
way). It immediately became obvioius that she was the best, funniest
writer among us.
I dumped the main responsibility for assigning most Mondo articles
onto her right after the third edition for two reasons. One was that
being the public face of Mondo was turning into a full time job;
particularly when combined with fielding multimedia offers like people
interested in developing TV shows and other bits of horseshit that
never amounted to anything. The other was that the new agey aspects of
Mondo drove her nuts. I was too close to too many "new agey" people
to avoid them or give them the boot. With Jude assigning and bringing
in most of the articles, it would change the overall character of the
magazine, even if a few "new agey" voices intruded here and there. When
Andrew Hultkrans, who was to some degree identifying with the GenX
"lets stop talking about the sixties all the time" mentality of that
time came on board as Managing Editor, it really got to be fun. We had
lots of lunch meetings and largely controlled the magazines content
for six or seven issues. After I quit the magazine one day in a huff
(you know, a small French sports car), I was sure that the magazine
would start to suck. But Jude and Andrew stayed on board and they came
out with what I still think was the best issue of Mondo ever (dont
remember the number but it was the one with interviews with Moravek and
Kroker in it).
She was great with the writers, that old enthusiasm made people glad
to work for our cheapo 5 cents per word and she didnt mind talking on
the phone for long hours jamming out ideas. (I hate long phone
conversations!) She seemed to put her "agorophobia" aside for an
extended period when she was Mondos Senior Editor, although she did
refuse to work in the office, which bugged our business manager, Linda.
She always had to be kicked a bit about deadlines, but really we were
pretty close to on-time for a quarterly during those few years. If we
were a bit late to the stands it was mostly because the advertising
wasnt in place yet (if ever)
Writing books with her was a different experience. Most of Cyberpunk
Handbook came out of her in a spontaneous outburst. Even before we
got our advance, shed kicked out a lot of really funny text. I still
think its a beautiful example of mordant humor based around the whole
idea of telling people how to be hip. And "How to Mutate & Take Over
the World" contains many Jude pieces that should be extracted and
published on their own. Oh dear, I had to kick Jude a lot to try to
get that one done though. We were both kind of lost in that book, but
I just kept charging forward like a quarterback figuring that even if
what I was writing was idiotic I could recontextualize it into
validity. But she crafted several gems witihin that book that deserve
to live on. I think the book might have worked if it had been designed
to look like a scrapbook, which was the idea
I cant seem to find words to express my emotions about losing Jude.
Even though I knew it was coming, it didnt hit me until it actually
happened. Right now, its just a feeling of emptiness; losing a family
member; someone I could talk to and lean on; one of those rare people
who never gives you any crap along with the good stuff. As a writer,
she was not a self-starter thats for sure. My role was to push her
to do it, which she always thanked me for profusely

What's that saying about never getting your props in your hometown?
The Oakland Tribune decided not to run a St. Jude of Berkeley obit but
she was on the front page in ....
India!
At least if you believe this blogger. I couldn't get the link to
work...
http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/

<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=102018
>
Hackers lose 'patron saint'
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2003 01:40:43 AM
If theres a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude
Milhon, the considered the internets real and very earthy patron
saint of hacking, shows up.
Better known on the internet by her nom de plume, St Jude, Milhon has
died of cancer. Her age was an issue Milhon decided not to address.
Even her closest friends could only guess at it, and they admitted they
could be off by as much as a decade.
She worked as a freelance cyberjournalist and as a programmer with
several Silicon Valley startupss. Her previous work includes a seminal
stint as senior editor for Mondo 2000, the cutting-edge magazine of
digital culture. In her work she explored boundaries and shaping of
identity in networked societies. St Jude coined the term cypherpunk
to describe cryptography activists, and has widely published on the
digital culture.
Her books include: The Cyberpunk Fake Book, How to Mutate and Take
Over the World (with R U Sirius).

This is from Andrew Hultkrans:
i don't have much to say at the moment; the feelings are too fresh. but i
will say that i had the pleasure of working and being friends with jude for
three years in my early twenties, a period when i was still mourning the
loss of my mother to cancer during my senior year in college. jude taught
me many things, about writing, about humor, about life, and i would be
lying if i said that there wasn't some transference going on. while
completely different than my mother in almost every way, jude (unknowingly)
filled that role for me when i was a confused, purposeless recent graduate,
and i'll never forget her for this. one of the most important lessons she
taught me (merely by example) was that you could follow your bliss in life
and be ok, and that you didn't have to act middle-aged just because you
were middle-aged. she was a true original, someone who lived her life
exactly how she wanted to, and she influenced many, many people along the
way, myself included. i'll always remain in her debt.
i've attached two pieces of mine that relate to jude--some comic relief and
some score-settling. i hope that everyone who was touched by jude will
carry her spirit within them for the rest of their days. RIP.
love,
andrew hultkrans
former managing editor/columnist, Mondo 2000
[Fake "review" of "How to Mutate and Take Over the World" that appears in
the book itself. I was commissioned by Jude to write the piece, and her
(and Ken's) writerly influence is all over it. I remember clearly Jude LOL
at my use of the word "enschwanzed."]
Apocalypse How?
How to Mutate and Take over the World
by R.U. Sirius and St. Jude
Ballantine Books, 1995
BY TOTO DEJOUISSANCE (ANDREW HULTKRANS)
Gonzo cyberpundits R.U. Sirius and St. Jude, abetted by a foolhardy
Ballantine Books, have produced the cyberpunk strokebook they've always
threatened to deliver--a millennial Baedeker clumsily entitled How to
Mutate and Take Over the World. Designed as a scrapbook from the future,
Mutate is devoid of conventional prose, substituting data trash
samizdat--e-mail exchanges, BBS banter, pirate advertisements, and
hypertechnical hooey--for linear narrative. Bereft of a responsible
narrator, Mutate unfolds through a virtual parade of terminal
identities--mainly no-account propeller heads and rebels sans
clue--revealing a teleology sans telos, a scatological eschatology, an
ass-backwards history book for an ahistorical, no-future generation. The
arcane, subcultural discourse of Mutate often devolves into an incestuous,
rhetorical circle jerk, as inviting to the uninitiated as a Monster
Truck/Tractor Pull, and just as inane.
Occasionally, Sirius & Co. wield the cutting edge like a spastic
Benihana chef, reducing the reader's hands to bloody hamburger in just a
few pages. All too often, though, the authors are merely slapping a dead
fish against the reader's back, in hopes of keeping him awake. One gets
the sense that Sirius intended Mutate's anti-structure as a
hyper-postmodernist intervention into the Western literary canon, yet it
reads as though the pages were spat out of a leaf blower. One hesitates to
call it a work of "literature," yet, forced into pre-existing categories,
Mutate fits (like a fat guy into a Go-Kart) into the satirical tradition.
An attempt to give Jonathan Swift a swift kick to the groin, Mutate thrusts
Satire into the 21st century, lurching and retching towards...well, just
lurching and retching. Indeed, Mutate qua satire is eminently more
forgivable than Mutate qua fiction. Considered as fiction, Mutate takes
its place with the Battlestar Galactica's of yesteryear, disposable sci-fi
destined for the bargain bin.
The "plot," insofar as one exists, traces future events from the
present to the year 2002 (this transparent one-upsmanship against Kubrick
did not go unnoticed by this reader), when the world ends in a sophomoric
nanotech disaster, covering the globe in key lime pie. The major players
in this post-structuralist playground are two collective entities--R.U.
Sirius' MONDO Vanilli Corp., a multimediocre entertainment organ, and St.
Jude's hacker "Underground," a liminal network of media pirates,
cryptoanarchists, and console cowboys. Both of these collectives find
themselves pitted against an increasingly repressive and tightassed
Establishment, characterized by the unfortunate cross-breeding of the
values of Catherine MacKinnon and Rush Limbaugh.
While the parodic exaggeration of current societal trends is
inspired, the authors spend so much time licking their own assholes with
self-congratulatory relish that one finds oneself unconsciously siding with
the dreary Overground. Indeed, the reader often unexpectedly finds himself
wading through a minefield of hypebites for Sirius' "band," MONDO Vanilli,
a experience not unlike negotiating a meadow of steaming cow pies without
one's galoshes. These delusions of power and influence beg for a Freudian
analysis of Mutate, which would surely reveal just how deeply enschwanzed
Sirius' and Jude's megalomaniac "roles" have become in their core
personalities. The authors may indeed become the menace to society they
long to be, but not as the countercultural power-brokers they now envision
themselves. Instead, they will fulfill their revolutionary fantasies as
the unwitting stooges of some shadowy Parallax Corporation, who will
satisfy their delusional desire to go out in an apotheosis of heroic
rebellion against "the Man" by having them take the fall for a minor
political assassination.
This ambiguity between fact and fantasy problematizes the core of
the Mutate project, threatening to reduce it to a cybersleaze version of
Sword of Shanarra. No amount of tongue-in-chic jargon can save the book
from the transparent desire of the authors to project themselves into an
anarcho-syndicalist wet dream of their own pathetic design. And it is the
exclusively private nature of the authors' desire that renders the book
impenetrable, or merely tiresome, to the average reader. Mutate does
everything it can not to invite the reader into its world. The reader in
search of frisson only gets pissed on. Even for the fearless reader with
more time than sense, an entrée into the world of Mutate is limited at
best, and whatever understanding the reader may glean will reveal an
unappealing and petty world which ends not with a bang but a wimpout.
[recent letter to the New York Times, unprinted]
Re: David Carr's review of Gary Wolf's "Wired: A Romance," Sunday Times
Book Review, 7/27/03
Editor,
To claim that Wired was "the first magazine to make the computer world seem
hip," as David Carr does in his review of Gary Wolf's history of the
publication, is like saying that the Rolling Stones invented the blues. Had
Carr read the fourth chapter of Wolf's book, he would have realized that
Wired had prominent, if far stranger, forebear in Mondo 2000, a quarterly
full-color glossy that preceded its more conventional imitator by four
years, reached a circulation of close to 100,000, and was covered by all
major cultural and news organs, including the New York Times and Time
magazine. Just as Wired was preparing its first editions, Time based a 1993
cover story on "cyberpunk" on Mondo 2000 and the subculture it covered and
celebrated, and in an unprecedented move for the stodgy newsweekly, allowed
Mondo designer Bart Nagel to create the cover illustration for that issue,
a Photoshop collage featuring Mondo deputy designer Heidi Foley.
Mondo editor-in-chief R.U. Sirius created the notion that the
magazine was a message from the future to the present in publicity material
in 1990, and was quoted in the New York Times about the publication's
intention to become "the Rolling Stone of the Information Age," a slogan
Louis Rosetto and Co. parroted a couple years later in launching Wired.
When the first few issues of Wired arrived in the Mondo offices, containing
articles on topics Mondo had covered, using writers previously associated
with Mondo, and a suspiciously similar logo design and spine, we on the
Mondo staff knew that we were being lifted. The editors and publishers of
Mondo were chummy with Wired executive editor Kevin Kelly, who shot back at
Sirius's comments on the similarities on the online community The WELL by
saying something to the effect of "Well, you're always advocating
appropriation, so fuck you!," a riposte Sirius was big enough to deem valid
and humorous.
Wired went on to produce a more corporate, straight-laced version
of Mondo that nevertheless contained many excellent, groundbreaking
articles before it devolved into a Fortune magazine for Dockers-wearing
Silicon Valley middle managers, seemingly designed to make such readers
feel hip for the first time in their lives. History may be written by the
victors, but in light of the recent death of Mondo senior editor St. Jude
Milhon, a member of one of the first experimental online communities (long
before the Internet as we know it existed) in early '70s Berkeley,
California, and who, along with a group of rogue cryptographers know as the
"cypherpunks," was the cover feature of Wired's second issue, those who
know the facts about the gestation of what came to be know as
"cyberculture" cannot remain silent witnesses.
Sincerely,
Andrew Hultkrans
Former Managing Editor and Columnist, Mondo 2000

One fine day in 1993, St Jude hacked my WELL account. She was
interested in something I had said somewhere, and decided to check out
what I had in my home directory. I never would have known this, except
that she also saw fit to email me about her exploit and tell me about
it. Now usually, people are pissed off to learn they've been hacked.
But I took it as an honor, since Jude (and Ken) were idols of mine. I
had been working very hard to inject something akin to their great
sense of postmodern style into the zine I was editing at the time
("PIX-Elation"), while publisher Karin August and I were struggling to
get it printed and distributed. So the fact that Jude showed any
interest at all in what I was writing could only mean that I was on the
right track. I still remember the breathless feeling I had as I
rushed to tell Karen about it via unix talk. Getting hacked by Jude
was nothing short of an inspiration.
I never met her personally, and we only exchanged a few emails. But I
was very familiar with her work and felt proud that she had even a
glancing knowledge of mine. Even from this great distance I saw her as
a brilliantly sharp-witted writer & researcher, a clever (and honest)
hacker, and just a really, truly unique person. The world is better
and much more interesting, thanks to her having been here to share some
time with us all. And I need to say:
THANK YOU ST JUDE.
LVX
TF

Yep, hacked. I could probably explain it better if I dug up Jude's
original email (it's on an old floppy somewhere around here), but from
what I recall, I think she used a sniffer to grab my password. Back in
those days I used (unencrypted) telnet to reach The WELL. ah,
memories...
LVX
TF

for st jude, from humdog.
it seems somehow not surprising that when a woman dies it is less
noticed than a man dying. i don't mean that we personally grieve less.
i mean that we notice it less. the death of st jude should have been
mentioned on CNN as a headline because st jude was a crucial person in
the development of interactive technology and crucial is the right
word. st jude was the late 20th century sign of the suffragette: she is
what a suffragette looks like now, and the brave ladies who fought for
the vote 100 years ago would have seen her and recognized her for what
she was and would have known her as a comrade in arms. st jude was
one of those who wished to permit women voyages. she overcame a barrier
as big as the right to vote.
st jude said, by example, that women had
a right and a responsibility to be technically literate and she did so
not by preaching about it. she did it simply by behaving as
if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for a woman to be a
technical master. i admire her for that. i admire her for
addressing by example the very real issue of cultural bias against
women in the technical arena instead of wasting her time worrying about
wheth or not a man insults a woman by opening a door for her. i
admire her for having the will to make, for having the will to create
and acting on it.
every woman online today owes a debt of gratitude to st jude.
i am one of those women.